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I recently spoke with my financial planner, Liz Schieck, about investing and saving for retirement. I asked her what she's hearing from clients, particularly millennials and Gen Z clients, about best practices.
We talked about three topics that come up frequently and the answers she gives when she gets questions about each of them.
Many new clients at Schieck's firm first reach out because they want to discuss saving for retirement. The pressure to plan for the future is why they book their first session, but it may not be the main topic of their eventual conversation, and they often feel anxious about that conversation.
Schieck notes a divide between people who have stable incomes and folks who work freelance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those for whom it's more straightforward to check a box and opt into a pension, whose path may closely resemble that of their parents, are more likely to talk to her about saving for retirement. Schieck muses that some people may look at saving for retirement as square or uncool.
"It can be a creative exercise to try and imagine what you might want your future to look like. It's not easy," says Schieck. She advocates for doing the work to consider what future-you might want to do, where you might want to be, how you might want to live. "I think it's kind of an exercise in hope," says Schieck. "There's going to be this choice later, where you can stop working if you want to and do something different where you don't have to worry about how much money you're making."
"I think the biggest perk in terms of retirement is, you have a mortgage-free place to live if you've paid off the mortgage," says Schieck. "That element of choice is key. When people make their house their only retirement savings … [and] they just focus on paying down their mortgage, people often talk about it as forced savings because you're building equity in this asset.
"But, if that's your only asset come retirement and you want to or need to stop working, then we don't have the same kind of choice. We have to find some way of turning that tangible asset into money you can spend at the grocery store, which either means selling it and moving into something smaller or renting, or renting out part of your home, or reenvisioning what that might look like."
In Schieck's experience, very few clients actually want to downsize. She cautions that if your home is your only retirement saving strategy, the only way it's really going to work for you without having to downsize is if you're willing to monetize it somehow, such as renting out a room in your home to help cover living costs. "Choice is good; we want to have our options open," she says. "I would rather someone rent forever and save for retirement than live in a house and be house-poor and never be able to save a dime."
Schieck says people should start saving for retirement in long-term savings no later than 35, even if they're not sure exactly how they'll use the money. She says flexibility is key when choosing a retirement account and that "What account you're using depends on your goals."
Schieck believes that you don't always have to know what you're saving for. You could put your savings into one pot that will help you save for short-, medium-, and long-term goals. We don't need to know exactly how much money we'll allocate to this or that — what matters most is our horizon time for using the funds.
In our rapidly changing world, it's more and more common for women to choose not to marry or have kids, and multigenerational living is more prevalent than ever. Thinking outside the box and getting creative about what your future could look like is wise. "Forget about 'when will I stop working?'" says Schieck. "What kinds of things do you think you might enjoy doing when you're in your 60s, 70s?" What's crucial is that we start thinking about what we might want and start investing in our future. Now.
